PLAINFIELD — There was an eerie silence in downtown Plainfield around midday Thursday — except for the sound of rushing water. People stood in small groups in the roads, some carrying waterlogged debris, while others ferried water and other supplies to and from buildings.
Others offered hugs as they were just beginning to take stock of the damage from last night’s storm. One of them was Sequana Skye, a hospice nurse who lives by herself in an apartment building on Hudson Avenue. The building backs up to the Great Brook — an offshoot of the nearby Winooski River — both of which swelled high overnight.
Skye’s first-floor apartment took on at least an inch of water throughout, she said. A crawl space below was inundated and the porch was in tatters. A layer of silt coated many of her belongings, and she wondered what she would be able to save.
Skye said she evacuated Wednesday evening after hearing what one neighbor, who had stopped to check in, called “ground thunder” coming from the waterway.
“It was terrifying,” Skye said. She said she believes all of her neighbors made it out of the storm safely, including the three other tenants in her building.
Michael Billingsley, the emergency management director for Plainfield, said Thursday morning that the whole center of town had essentially been “washed out.” Entire buildings had been swept away, he said, along with seven bridges and several crucial culverts.
At least two dozen people had been evacuated, Billingsley said.
The town’s water main was also down, he said, with no certainty about when it might be functional again
The lack of water, and the extent of the damage to roads in town, he said, also meant that the Plainfield Health Center had been closed. Additionally, according to Billingsley, the town’s own road repair equipment was inaccessible due to flooding.
Perhaps the most dramatic scene in town was just around the corner from Skye’s apartment — the bridge that carried Mill Street across the Great Brook had been completely washed away. Across the waterway, which was still raging, part of a gray apartment building sat dangling over the edge of the bank — half of a kitchen had been ripped open to the elements.
Plainfield Town Clerk Bram Towbin confirmed that at least half of the apartment complex had crumbled and was swept away.
Hudson Avenue, where Skye lives, was a bumpy mess of mud and puddles. Some residents were starting to pump flood water out of their basements. Trees and other vegetation were scattered in thick masses all along the banks of the brook, entrapping several cars.
Walking through her apartment, which was dark with no power, Skye noted that the floorboards were beginning to buckle from the water. She cracked open her back door, pushing through thick mud, and looked out at the waterway.
“I swear to you, it was like a babbling brook. And I sat and drank coffee yesterday on my little porch, listening to the brook and being so happy,” she said. Now there was so much dirt and mud everywhere, she said, that it “looks like some kind of desert.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Flooding ravages Plainfield.